Bring Her Home by David Bell
My rating: 3/5 cats
this book is fine if you’re looking for a fast read that’s gonna keep your mind diverted for a time, but it’s got some problems. i read this as an arc, and i’m totally willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for some of the cosmetic ones, like someone using the wrong character’s name in a conversation, or someone who should know better using the term “gender identity” when discussing a homosexual character, or a person whose arms are “crossed” but still has her right hand resting on her waist, her elbow at forty-five degree angle to her body, all of which will likely be caught on the final editorial pass before publication, but there are more substantial errors/contradictions here, the most glaring involving the circumstances around a character’s bracelet, and some things that are too deeply ingrained textually to be anything other than an author’s conscious choice; things that came across a little amateurish for someone with so many books under their belt.
i’ve never read david bell before, even though i have bought at least three of his earlier works because they sounded right up my alley, so i don’t know if this is true to form for him, or if this review by a fan is accurate, and he’s “phoning it in” this time, but there are definitely some issues.
i’ll point to the good stuff first. the plot is fertile soil for drama and suspense: recently widowed bill price’s fifteen-year-old daughter summer goes missing along with her best friend haley. after a few days of gut-wrenching anxiety, summer is found in a local park, badly beaten, unconscious, unable to explain what has happened to her or where haley is. from that point on, it’s all zoom zoom zoom through a series of revelations and twists told in very short chapters (93 chapters and an epilogue in about 425 pages), as bill takes the investigation into his own hands, uncovers secrets about his family, and questions his paternal abilities, which faltered while he was isolated in his own grief and personal demons.
it hits all the marks a psych thriller is meant to hit: there are red herrings and action sequences and an investigative arc in which information unspools slowly, driving the narrative towards its conclusion.
it’s just not particularly literary. if that doesn’t matter to you, have at it – i would definitely recommend this as a vacation or an escapist/unwinding book, one which is gonna hold your interest for its duration. the whodunnit is pretty well-telegraphed, but there are other splinter revelations that are more than enough to keep you invested in the story even if you know who the baddie is.
if you’re more picky about character, style, ‘authenticity,” you may run into problems.
even though this is all told from bill’s POV, complete with interior monologues, we don’t really get a sense of who he is as a character. he’s still grieving his wife, complete with sentimental, fetishized attachments to her belongings, and he’s angry all the time and prone to violence. those are pretty much the only two speeds this character has, and we flip back and forth between the two. he’s always angry, always usually suppressing his impulses to lash out, but that struggle doesn’t come across cool like wolverine; his temper flares are so frequently over minor affronts, they come across as the tantrum-bursts of a child.
as far as structure, there’s something about it that reads like a play – so many intimate conversations occur in which every character has information about summer, but they don’t give it up all at once – it’s staggered out between several different meetings, and always prefaced by a dramatic announcement along the lines of “there’s something you should know,” or “it’s time you heard the truth,” or some such variation, usually serving as the breaking-point between chapters, and divulged regardless of whether the character’s profession contains some sort of expectation of confidentiality (pastor, guidance counselor), or whether it might be more appropriate for them to tell the police instead of the victim’s father, especially after bill has some pretty public episodes that show off his temper and the police are looking into him as a suspect. this piecemeal exposition stretches out the suspense, but it also stretches a reader’s willingness to buy into the situation.
if any of those things are going to bother you, maybe pick something else up for now, but for a summer release, it’s perfectly entertaining as long as you don’t expect it to raise the bar of psych suspense or be a book you hand down reverently from generation to generation.
